Dec. 9, 2010
Recap | Box Score | Notes | Photo Gallery 
Vanderbilt Head Coach Melanie Balcomb
On Hannah Tuomi’s play the last couple games…
“Hannah’s just really consistent right now. Coming off of 29 points, they really focused on her and packed it in and let us shoot the three, so she rebounded. She worked hard enough to where we got drives because she was sealing. We got a lot of things because she was posting and two people had to play her sometimes three, so it gave us wide open looks.”
On the close end to the first half…
“We got tired and you know they didn’t sub, so that’s what’s tough because we got tired and we subbed. It’s been tough, we’re academically up all night writing papers and they’re tired but not from practice. They’re tired from school right now…when you have kids that normally are really well conditioned and play a lot of minutes and you can tell that their academics have really been pushing them lately and we got tired so we subbed.”
On UT-Martin’s Jaclissa Haslip
“She’s their shooter and we were supposed to be focused on that, letting her have the three, but we just kept getting attacked on the dribble and that sucks us in too much. We should have done a better job at keeping the ball in front on the ball handler and that causes the defense to collapse in and then they kicked it out.”
Hannah Tuomi
On her career high rebounding…
“It kind of helps out a bit when the other team is smaller than you, obviously. In every game I try to go in there and rebounding is one of my roles on the team, so I go into every game saying, `Okay, I’m going to get rebounds. I’m going to get rebounds.’ It just so happens that tonight I caught a few more than I normally do.”
On UT-Martin’s performance…
“They came back in the game and they cut the countdown down to four, so yea they definitely surprised us there. They had been on the road for nine straight games so we were expecting them to be really tired, you know worn out, but definitely they put up a pretty good fight.”
UTM Head Coach Kevin McMillan Quotes
On Hannah Tuomi’s performance…
“You can look at a stats sheet and see that (Jaclissa) Haislip, (Heather) Butler, and (Jasmine) Newsome carried us on the offensive end of the floor. The difference, I thought, in the game was (Hannah) Tuomi, without question. She didn’t miss a shot. She ended up with 15 points and 13 rebounds. But I thought that our two posts that guarded her, they’re all going to be sore tomorrow because they were battling there. That’s all we can ask our kids to do is battle every possession, every trip up and down the floor, and give ourselves a chance.”
On his young team…
“We’ve got the youngest team in the country. There’s no secret about that. We’ve got two years of experience. We thought with what we were going to have to do this year we could come in and try to ease our way up and build the first year to get to the second year and build and build. And that’s probably the smart thing to do. Honestly, it probably is, but we looked at it and said OK, what’s going to give us a chance at the end, in the tournaments, to win ballgames and make it to the NCAA Tournament and we said these kids are going to have to grow up quick and how do you make them grow up quick. Well, let’s put the toughest schedule we’ve ever put together in front of them. All right. Is that enough? Nope. Let’s do more than that, let’s put it on the road. And you’re going to have to grow up. One way or another you’re going to have to grow up. And I think we’re in the middle of that right now and I think they’re doing that.”
On the game changer…
“We got the ball game back down to about six or seven with about 6 minutes to go and that was when I thought the key was. We missed a lay-up, we missed one defensive assignment, and we gave up an offensive rebound and the game went from six or seven to 16 and that was the three possessions, that’s was what caused the game to change. When we play somebody like them, we can’t afford to make those kinds of mistakes. We have to make every free throw, we have to make every easy shot, and we have to hope that they miss some. And they missed some looks that they usually don’t miss. I’d like to say it was our defense, but they were pretty open. Sometimes the ball didn’t go in. But I thought that game at that 6 minute mark is where you saw it swing and the bottom dropped out for us.”
